Steve Lichtag

Twelve-year-old Ariana has been plagued by adversity since childhood. Alone in the world with an extraordinary gift of magic, she ends up in an orphanage, where she has to endure bullying from other children and teachers. But all the little girl wants is to find a home and find out who her parents were. Her life is suddenly turned upside down when the old alchemist Archivald seeks her out. He offers her the opportunity to enter the school of alchemists, where she will find not only her dream home, but also inseparable friends. However, in order to become a full-fledged student, she must pass the entrance exams. Young alchemists Lora and Mertur prepare her for these exams. At the school, she will not only gain new knowledge and friendships, but also uncover ancient secrets. And when the witch Murien appears, Ariana must risk everything to find out the truth about her past.

This time, the eight-year-old girl must fight to keep her parents from turning the House of Horrors, which she received as a gift from her grandfather, the Viennese Czech Swoboda, into a family villa. Helping her are her old friends, with the help of a magical clockwork mannequin, the witch Bertha, the charming Elvira and Dr Caligari. She arranges for notary Weber to come from Vienna to check that the terms of the gift agreement have been kept and that the attraction is fit for purpose...

The fifteen year old Maruska starts as a new staff in the porcelain warehouse. For the boss Svetla it is the last straw. She asked to extend her staff consisting of four girls and a retired lady by a man, not a child. The kind and ever fussy Svetla, battling in vain with overweight decides to leave her position and to take another one in the office. As soon as she finds out that the position will be taken by Arnost Jarolím, she insists on a hand over inventory.

A marquee stands on a sprawling Prague housing estate and is home to two young bricklayers, who have all sorts of life experiences waiting for them in the city. Around the two rural bricklayers absorbed by the big city, the entertainment is more than a little embarrassing, toothless, revealing that at the height of normalisation, even the jolly genre of drama fared poorly, and any satirical allusions were especially undesirable. With no sense of humorous exaggeration and no wittily punctuated plots, the story unfolds, showing how the characters, living in a marquee standing on a sprawling estate, face all the pitfalls of the "big world"...

Police find a girl with a bleeding face in a small town park at night. First the girl, a textile factory worker Jana, refuses to talk, and then she decides to tell the truth. After her father's death she, by herself, takes care of her younger brother called Pinda. She does not like the influence that a gang of older boys from the factory exercise over her brother. The gang leader Jirka, called King, is admire by local girls whose number exceeds boys in the town because there are many textile factories where only girls are working. They easily yield to him and then he easily gets rid of them. Jana is a hard nut for him. She refuses his purposeful courtesy and thus she unintentionally gets his attention. King inspires the gang on how to get money by stealing textile from the factory warehouse.

The heroes of this wacky spectacle are the large Karafiát family, who, in the emerging market conditions, decide to abandon their current way of making a living (stealing funeral wreaths and transforming them into artfully tied bouquets) and start a business. This is how the peculiar travel agency Český ráj, built on the ingenious idea of not taking poor Czech tourists abroad, but on the contrary, rich foreigners to Bohemia, sees the light of day. Thanks to a quirky advertising campaign, a motley mix of French people actually manage to board a bus in Paris and set off. But the Karafiats' entrepreneurial worries are just beginning.

Set in a 1950s Moravian wine village, an elderly Josef, guided by his quirky life philosophy and humor, recalls key moments from his past. Across nine seasonal vignettes filled with local folklore and customs, he and his fellow elders remain fully engaged in the joys and trials of village life.